


Wrote Your Name Upon the Strand

by theswearingkind



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:55:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1677209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theswearingkind/pseuds/theswearingkind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m sorry,” the Captain says, after the second time, but he doesn’t mean it.  “I’m sorry, Sam, but that’s his name.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wrote Your Name Upon the Strand

**Author's Note:**

> Written quickly for a friend who had a bad day. Posted with only minor changes and no beta, so proceed with caution.
> 
> Title modified from Edmund Spenser.

_Who the hell is—_

“I’m sorry,” the Captain says, after the second time, but he doesn’t mean it. “I’m sorry, Sam, but that’s his name.” 

The containment cell is sound-proofed, in theory. You can still hear. You listen between heartbeats, the way you were trained, and pick up the thin band of steel underlying through the Captain’s deceptively mild voice. 

“And I’m just saying, I think it’s counter-productive,” the Falcon replies. “You have to approach him as who he is _now_ , Steve, not who he was seventy years ago.”

The Falcon’s names click through your brain like slides on a shutter screen, technology you remember from your first few kills. Wilson, Sam. _Click_. Soldier in a new war. _Click._ Counselor to people who can’t handle life after the fight. _Click._ Friend to one man dead in the desert, to another wasting time looking for a man who died in the ice. _Click._

“He’s the same person. He’s still Bucky,” the Captain says, and the anger in his voice echoes through the perfect silence of the cell as clearly as if you’d stood up from the corner where you sit, applied pressure to the weak spot near the base boards, used your better arm to tear the reinforced rebar through the concrete, speared the metal through the sole hollow spot in the six inches of one-way mirror, wrenched the bar sideways, and watched the whole wall come crashing down before you disarmed them both and walked away. 

“Are you the same person you were, Steve?” the Falcon asks, not gentle but kind, and the Captain goes silent again.

You know the answer to that one, at least.

*

“I’m sorry,” Rogers says, after the next time, and the next time, and the next.

_Who the hell—_

*

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, the last time, and his face is tired, the weight of ninety-five years sitting heavily on his young man’s face. “Sometimes I—I just forget.” 

You know what that’s like.

Steve sighs, then, broad shoulders drooping, and scrubs a too-large hand over his face. On any other man, you think, it would spell frustration, but on Steve it looks like defeat. Like surrender. Like the seconds you watched him fall from the sky.

Sometimes you forget, too. You wake up and the bed is soft and warm, and there are long moments of disorientation as you anticipate the sting of cold against your skin. No matter how long they kept you awake, you never seemed to thaw. Until you saw the man on the bridge, the cold was the only memory that remained.

Until you saw the man on the bridge, who was the Captain, who was the mission, who is Steve, who is the man you knew. The man you still know, the man you followed into war and will again, whether he wants you to or not. 

“I never asked you to stop,” you manage to say, and your voice is creaky from disuse. The smile that spreads across his face, slow but growing, looks the same.

Who—

You.


End file.
